Playful Poems

e amusements a game which carried all before it in Queen Anne's day, and which is really, when cleared of its gambling details, as good a domestic game for three players as cribbage or piquet is for two. My "Court Gamester," which was in its fifth edition in 1728, after devoting its best energies to ombre, contented its readers in fewer pages with the addition only of piquet and chess.

Obsolete words and words of Scottish dialect, with a few more as to the meaning of which some readers might be uncertain, will be found explained in the Glossary that ends this volume.

CHAUCER'S MANCIPLE'S TALE OF PHOEBUS AND THE CROWMODERNISED BY LEIGH HUNT.

NOTE.

The reader is to understand, that all the persons previously described in the "Prologue to the Canterbury Tales" are now riding on their way to that city, and each of them telling his tale respectively, which is preceded by some little bit of incident or conversation on the road. The